"Ron
Brown is a certified fitness trainer who doesn't have an inch of flab on
his body. He'll tell you what you can do to become fit and trim too."
TALK
TO AMERICA, Washington DC

YOU'VE FOLLOWED
your diet, and your waist is down an inch. Using The
Body Fat Guide, you calculate that you've lost 4 pounds of body fat, or
approximately one pound for each quarter-inch your waist reduced in size.
Congratulations! You feel like you deserve a treat, so you break away from your
diet composed largely of unprocessed natural foods and indulge in a feast of
conventional food.

Within a day or two of loading up on a conventional diet you
are shocked to discover your waist has increased by more than half an inch,
indicating you regained two pounds of body fat! But, you think, although you ate
heavier, there's no way you overate enough to account for a gain of two pounds
of body fat. Since a pound of body fat contains 3,500 calories, that would mean
you took in 7,000 extra calories above your maintenance caloric intake level in
only one day or two. But, when you add up your actual caloric intake over that
time it doesn't come anywhere close to that amount, adding up to much less. What's going on? Where did
that extra weight come from?

Aside from carrying extra food in your belly (gastrointestinal
contents) the usual explanation for such a sudden increase in weight and waist
size following a proper diet is bloating from increased salt intake.

Common table salt is the term used for the sodium chloride we
add to our food. The amount of salt we shake onto our food, however, is not
usually our main source of salt intake. We receive
about 80% of our salt intake from sodium chloride which is added to most of the processed
food we eat. And it seems we are eating more processed food today than ever. Our
bodies only require about 500 mg of sodium a day, and this should be obtained
from within natural foods, not added to food in the form of sodium chloride.
However, we typically get as much as 6,000-8,000 mg of sodium a day! Salt is practically everywhere, and its harmful effect on our
bodies is also rampant among us, causing health problems ranging from
cardiovascular disease to cataract
formation!

The reason salt causes bloating is that your body retains water
to dilute it in order to protect your tissues from salt's harmful irritating
effect. Getting a bit of salt in your eye is a good demonstration of this
irritating effect. If you can imagine that irritation occurring throughout your
body, you'll begin to see why salt causes so many health problems.

Salt and Vision Problems

Speaking of salt and your eyes, there is much evidence to
implicate salt in causing vision problems. The eyes, after all, are part of your
body, and they can be affected by the bloating resulting from salt intake as
much as other tissues. When this bloating from salt (edema) occurs in the eye,
the alignment of the eye's internal components may be thrown off resulting in
errors of refraction. Although surgeon's can correct some of these alignment problems by
cutting and flattening the cornea, this does not address the cause of the cornea's swelling (corneal edema), which
may result from salt water bloating within
the eye. Researchers have induced edema in the cornea of laboratory animals by
soaking the removed cornea in a salt solution. Research also showed that cataract formation, a clouding of the lens,
was positively
associated with salt intake (Cumming, 2000).

China, Japan, and other Asian countries have the highest consumption of dietary salt
in the world, and these countries also have the highest prevalence of
nearsightedness, or myopia. Primitive populations within Africa, Brazil, and
other areas with low salt intake do not have high reported rates of myopia. Studies of
the traditional hunter/gatherer diet of Eskimos
showed that myopia increased in younger generations of Eskimos who began to eat
a Western diet, which included more salt. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported
back in 1947 that vision improved in patients who followed a low-salt Rice Diet developed by Kempner.

The body contains sodium-potassium pumps within most of the
cell membranes that help to eliminate excessive amounts of sodium. However,
these pumps can only achieve their objective of maintaining the proper
concentration of intracellular sodium when they are not overloaded with a
continual heavy intake of salt.

Salt and Vascular Problems

Although scientists have long suspected a link between salt
intake and cardiovascular disease, a recent study by Brigham and Women's
Hospital and Harvard Medical School (Cook
et al, 2007) confirms that people who reduced their salt
intake by 25-30% had an equal reduction in risk of cardiovascular disease of 25%.

Dr. Norm Campbell of Blood Pressure
Canada, who is leading the development of a National Sodium Policy in Canada,
states, "If we discovered that a food additive was causing 30 percent
of all cancers, something would be done right away. The same action is needed
with sodium to prevent stroke, heart disease and other vascular illnesses."

In the U.S., the American Medical
Association is urging the federal government's Food and Drug Administration to
immediately place mandatory regulations on the amount of salt added to processed
foods.

How to Monitor and Eliminate Salt Water Bloat

The Body Fat Guide can help you monitor the effect of
salt water bloat on your body. Simply take the overall change in your bodyweight
and subtract any change that you calculate is due to a positive calorie balance
(when your caloric intake is higher than your calorie expenditures). Since there
are no calories in water, the amount of any weight left over will usually equal
the amount of water you are retaining, most likely from salt in your diet. This
may easily add up to several pounds or more! With the ability to monitor salt
water retention in this manner, you can more easily take effective action to
eliminate processed foods in your diet, reduce your salt intake, reduce bloating
from water retention, reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease, and improve your health!